A further Stoic idea about gratitude is that as we are dying we should be grateful for the life and all the experiences the universe has given us. We’ll explore this idea at the end of this chapter.
UNDERSTANDING GRATITUDE
We should make every effort to be as grateful as possible.
—Seneca, Letters 81.19
What makes gratitude interesting is that it’s both an emotion and a virtue. Yet, in the words of philosopher Robert Solomon, it’s “one of the most neglected emotions and one of the most underestimated of the virtues.”16 Significantly, as he notes, gratitude deals with the way we relate to other people, so it “lies at the very heart of ethics.” From a Stoic perspective, this is another way that love and gratitude come together as forms of appreciation: they both make a functioning, ethical society possible. In terms of ethical development, we would not see people who lack either love or gratitude as being virtuous. We would see them as possessing a significant defect in their character. Put another way, without love and gratitude, it’s simply impossible to live well. Or as Seneca might have described it, without love and appreciation, it’s impossible to live “the happy life.”
Throughout the history of modern psychology, psychologists have focused on trying to understand human misery and pathology, even though most people are happy most of the time. In a study from the year 2000, in which people were tested at random, 89 percent were experiencing a state of happiness, while a much smaller percentage was experiencing a state of sadness. The most frequently experienced negative emotion was anxiety.17 Not surprisingly, according to a 2007 study, happy people live about 14 percent longer than unhappy people.18
In recent years, the study of “positive psychology,” including the study of gratitude, has emerged as a new field of research. Psychologists like P. C. Watkins have discovered that gratitude is not just “an important facet of emotional well-being.” Instead, gratitude “actually causes increases in happiness.”19 After years of study, Watkins concluded that “Gratitude enhances well-being because psychologically it amplifies the good in one’s life.” That’s “because it clearly identifies who and what is good for individuals.”20 Obviously, the Stoics (and the world’s religious traditions) were onto something important by emphasizing the importance of gratitude in daily life. Thousands of years later, psychologists are beginning to catch up by studying gratitude and other positive emotions scientifically.
But what is gratitude, really? At its most basic, gratitude has been described as “the positive recognition of benefits received.”21 It’s a feeling of thankfulness or appreciation for receiving something of value, a good or a gift. Many people imagine that you must be thankful to someone or to a person in order to experience gratitude. And while that’s true for some kinds of gratitude, it’s not true for all kinds of gratitude.
In essence, people experience three main types of gratitude, which I’ve summarized in figure 8.
1.The first type of gratitude I call personal or civic gratitude because it’s directed at another person. It’s the kind of gratitude we experience in a social or civic setting when someone does something nice for us or offers us a gift.
Types of Gratitude
Objects
Personal or Civic
Another Person
Theistic
God or gods
Cosmic, Existential, or Nonpersonal
Nature, the Cosmos, or Existence
Fig 8: Three types of gratitude.
2.The second type of gratitude I call theistic gratitude because it is directed at God (or the gods, if you are a polytheist). If you are a religious person—especially if you are Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—this kind of theistic gratitude is very similar to personal gratitude, because those religions view God as a person. They also see God as the ultimate giver.
3.The third type of gratitude I call cosmic, existential, or nonpersonal gratitude. It is different from the first two types of gratitude because it’s not directed at a person (like a human or God). Instead, it’s directed at nature, the cosmos, or existence itself. Or sometimes it’s not directed at anything, but a recognition of blessings received. In a sense, this is a spiritual sense of gratitude, and it was a kind of gratitude the Stoics felt. But it’s not directed at a creator God who stands outside the universe. In other words, it’s distinct from both personal and theistic gratitude.
Sometimes these different kinds of gratitude can intermingle with one another. For example, every morning, my wife brings a cup of black tea with milk to my bedside table, which I then drink while waking up. (If she doesn’t bring me a cup of tea, it means she’s upset with me, which always sends an important message!) Of course, when she brings me a cup of tea, I’m very grateful to her as a person, and I always thank her. But then, as I sip the tea, I usually feel other kinds of gratitude, too, which is a perfect way to start the day. Sometimes I feel grateful for the tea and caffeine itself, as my consciousness begins to come into focus. Sometimes I feel thankful for the pleasurable feeling of sitting in such a warm, comfortable bed, and having a solid roof over my head, especially since some people are homeless and forced to sleep outside. Sometimes, I feel grateful for having clean air to breathe. Sometimes I feel grateful for being able to write while drinking my tea. And sometimes, I feel grateful for all of those things in a very short period. Besides being grateful to my wife, though, these other kinds of gratitude are not directed at a person. How, then, do we explain these other kinds of gratitude?
If you’re a religious person, I hope you won’t be upset at me for saying this, but I don’t direct my gratitude toward a personal God when drinking my tea. But does that mean I’m an atheist? The answer would be “No.” That said, it doesn’t mean that I’m a theist either. Personally, I hate being pigeonholed into these kinds of categories. But if I were forced to imprison myself in one of these conceptual boxes, I would probably say: “I’m more of a pantheist, like the Stoics were, like Spinoza and Einstein were—and even popular luminaries like Carl Sagan.”22
Pantheists believe that there is no God “outside” the universe. Instead, they believe that the entire universe is God, including the laws and principles that shape it. Of course, atheism, theism, and pantheism are not scientifically testable concepts. But like Carl Sagan, I find pantheism to be a much more useful metaphor than the idea of God as a person who exists outside the cosmos, as someone who drew up a plan for the universe.23 Certainly, none of the ancient Greek philosophers thought of God in that kind of way.24 That said, regardless of people’s religious beliefs (or lack of beliefs), I can happily get along with anyone, especially if they recognize the importance of love and gratitude. Those are character traits and fundamental human values that should bind all people together, regardless of faith or belief.
A DIFFERENT SENSE OF GRATITUDE
Some people—mainly analytical philosophers (who focus on language) or theologians (who believe in a personal God)—have claimed that it only makes sense for someone to be grateful to a person: that is, to another human being or to God. In other words, they believe that cosmic or nonpersonal gratitude is not possible. In my view, this is a bit of dubious thinking, which discriminates against people who don’t think exactly the same way that the deniers do. It implies that you need to have special, limited beliefs to experience gratitude. It also suggests that certain types of gratitude, which people have experienced for thousands of years, are not intellectually credible but “off-limits.”